Summary:
The future renewal of bus fleets with the licensed public transport companies will be significantly affected by Switzerland’s 2050 energy strategy. The energy source, operation, maintenance and TCO will be completely different in the future and will make for a challenging replacement of an existing bus fleet. A detailed feasibility study [1], funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Transport (FOT) and carried out in close collaboration with the Transports Publics Fribourgeois (TPF), evaluates the technical and economic feasibility of replacing the Diesel buses in the TPF fleet with buses equipped with a hydrogenpowered combustion engine (H2ICE). An extensive measurement campaign on various bus lines of the TPF network was carried out and served as a basis for the simulations used to define the TCO of the future Hydrogen Bus with Internal Combustion Engine (H2BICE). In parallel, an engine base was identified in Fiat Powertrain Technologies (FPT) range to be converted to hydrogen combustion and a vehicle base was selected from the bus manufacturer HESS. The conditions necessary for the integration of the various components required for the realisation of a bus equipped with an H2ICE were considered to verify the feasibility of the vehicle. The work carried out has shown that the realisation of such a vehicle is possible both technically and in terms of safety, and that it is for extra-urban journeys economically very competitive compared to the CO2-neutral technologies known to date.
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